2017-2019 RTC Course Offerings - Michigan Technological University

2017-2019 RTC Course Offerings

Fall 2017
HU 5004 Cultural Theory……………………………………………………..…..Strickland

CRN 85018      3:35pm – 4:50pm TR Walker 329B

HU5004 Cultural Theory

This course explores key issues in how cultural contexts and processes of
communication affect representation, understanding, and practice. Topics include a
historical overview of the concept of “culture” in Modernity; theories of ideology and
subjectivity; structuralism, poststructuralism and psychoanalytic frameworks for
understanding culture; humanist, feminist, materialist, and postcolonial theories, and
issues of cultural production and circulation in digital and new media environments.

Required Texts:
You'll need to acquire four books, The Portable Karl Marx, edited by Eugene
Kamenka, Cultural Theory: An Introduction, by Philip Smith and Alexander Riley, The
Theory Toolbox by Jeffrey Nealon and Susan Searles Giroux, and Biopolitics: A
Reader, by Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze. These should be available at the
bookstore, or you can get them from Amazon.com or other online booksellers. There
will be other readings made available as online texts.
(Groundwork, Global Literacy)

HU 5006 Continental Philosophy………………………..………………..…...Morrison

CRN 85019     2:05pm – 3:20pm TR Walker 329B

This course will explore the themes of identity and difference in 20th century
philosophy and political theory. We will begin with an examination of influential
accounts of human subjectivity in the works of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault,
Frantz Fanon and Judith Butler. Generally speaking, “subjects” in continental thought
are understood as embodied beings-in-the-world who are defined by relations to
others, relations mediated by language and technology, and characterized by power.
Continental philosophy has thus offered a significant and influential challenge to
traditional “humanist” theories of autonomous subjectivity and agency. In the second
part of the course we will focus specifically on the question of language and discourse
as conditions of identity-formation. And in the last section, we will look at the
contemporary political and economic context of identity-formation. In particular, we
will examine the issues of ethnicity, class, nationality, and migration in the context of

                                                                                            1

globalization through selections from works like Jean-Luc Nancy's Globalization,
Derrida's Rogues, and Butler and Athanasiou’s Dispossession and Thomas Nail’s The
Figure of the Migrant.
(Groundwork, Global Literacy)

HU 5007 Critical Perspectives on Globalization………………………….…Amador

CRN 85020     7:05pm – 9:35pm Thursday Walker 329B

This course explores through various critical methodologies how the categories of
Nation, Race, Class, and Gender (to name a few) work to define the construction of
"The Global" as a concept. Students will engage theories in critical sociology and
anthropology; historical materialist political economy and systems-theory; and
contemporary analyses of coloniality and biopolitics, in order to analyze how the role of
creating categories of study is central to studying world-historical processes of global
integration. In the course, students will be asked to draw from their own research
interests (from Scientific and Technical Communication to Cultural Studies) in order to
produce novel categories or refine current categories for comprehension of
globalization as a process and the Global as a concept. This course is intended to
satisfy both the Methods and Methodologies and the intercultural/global literacy
requirement.
(Groundwork, Global Literacy)

HU 6010 Special Topics in Communications – Media Studies..……..Collins

CRN 85021 7:05pm – 9:35pm Wednesday Walker 329B

This course introduces approaches to media studies and various methods of inquiry
focused around three overlapping areas of communication research: 1) the medium as
technological object, cultural form, and historical artifact; 2) media practice as
industries and institutions; 3) audience and media reception. The course considers the
methodological assumptions and objectives of a range of qualitative texts within these
three areas, drawing from semiotics, medium theory, media archaeology, cultural
history, political economy, social theory, and cultural studies. We examine the nature
of research questions particular to the field of media studies as well as the strengths
and limitations of methods used to address such questions. Readings include
explanations of methodological approaches, but by way of specific interesting
theoretical and/or empirical studies on such topics as the printing press, news,
Hollywood, television, celebrity, fandom, advertising, and media policy, to name a few.
Assignments include short analysis papers on different methodological approaches and
a proposal design outlining a research project.
(Methodology)

                                                                                          2

HU 6050 Special Topics in Language & Literature: Introduction to Poetic
Theory & Praxis…………………………………………………………………………Seigel

CRN 84347     9:35am – 10:50am TR Walker 329B

"But we enter on burning ground as we approach the poetry of times so near to us..."
––Matthew Arnold

This course will explore poetics broadly, including, but not limited to: Transcultural
poetics (alternate languages, writing systems, text-forms, oral cultures &
performances); a brief world history of poetics; genealogies & continuities of the
avant-garde; architectonics of the book; present practices in innovative poetics (eco- &
bio-politics, poetics of the political economy of affect, contemporary cross-cultural
poetics & translation, violence and representation, gender and experiments in form,
poetics of minor literatures, speculative poetics and contemporary imagination, etc.).
Students will read and reflect on the writings of Peter Bürger, Mary Ann Caws, Renato
Poggioli, Marjorie Perloff, Kryzysztof Ziarek, etc. Coursework will conclude with an
article length paper on poetics as well as an attempt at a short poetry manuscript
(doing is learning).
(Global Literacy)

Spring 2018

HU 5003 Technical and Scientific Communication …………………………Fiss

CRN 15022        9:35am – 12:05pm Thursday

This course provides an advanced introduction to Technical and Scientific
Communication, especially in its intersections with science and technology studies. The
interdisciplinary field of Technical and Scientific Communication combines history,
theory, professional practice, and pedagogy to encourage the examination of science
and technology as evolving, complex forms of knowledge, social constructs, and
realms of human life.

We begin by reading about current research in the field and looking at a few
frameworks for considering Technical and Scientific Communication from the
perspectives of rhetoric, philosophy, history, communication, education, and other
fields. We then work through a series of case studies to try out the different
approaches. Throughout, we’ll be thinking about how well the frameworks match the
case studies, as we consider the varied places of Technical and Scientific
Communication in the workplace, the laboratory, the classroom, and our broader lives.
(Groundwork)

                                                                                       3

HU 5113 Cultural Studies………………………………………………..…………Slack

CRN 15023         3:35pm – 4:50pm TR

Introduction to the theoretical history, methods, and practice of cultural studies.
Includes the influence of literary humanism, Marxism, structuralism, subcultural
studies, feminism, postmodernism, articulation theory, Deleuze and Guattari.
(Global Literacy, Methodology)

HU 6060 Special Topics in Philosophy: Philosophy of Language…Marratto

CRN 15024         9:35-12:05pm Thursday

This course will consider the philosophy of a language as a major development in 20th
century thought. Our examination may include formal-logical accounts of language
(Russel, Ayer, Frege, early Wittgenstein), structuralism (Saussure), and
phenomenological approaches to language (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty). We will
then investigate significant developments in later 20th century thought about language,
possibly including: the later Wittgenstein's conception of "language games"; Merleau-
Ponty's problematic of language and ontology; Foucault's conception of "discourse,"
discursive formations, and power; Austin's conception of "speech acts" and
performativity; Derrida's concepts of writing, "grammatology," and technicity; embodied
cognition theories of language (Merleau-Ponty, David McNeill, and Lakoff and Johnson);
Butler's feminist deployment of speech-act theory, phenomenological, and
deconstructive approaches to language. We will consider the implications of these
different approaches to language for our understandings of rhetoric, communication,
subjectivity and politics. (Methodology)

HU 6050 Special Topics in Language & Literature………..………Viera-Ramos

CRN 14036         7:05pm – 9:35pm Thursday

Everything you always wanted to know about psychoanalysis but were afraid to ask
cinema.

The title of this seminar echoes Slavoj Žižek’s edited volume—and bestseller—Everything
You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. Beside the
theoretical component of this book, Žižek’s endeavor helps to take psychoanalysis out of
its hermeneutic discourse to a wider intellectual thinking community like, in his case,
political philosophy. Since its rising texts, psychoanalysis has developed a symbiotic
relationship with philosophy, literature, theater and the social sciences (such as
anthropology or history). Parallel to psychoanalysis, the film industry—and its
consequent theorization—opened a different sensibility for the modern consumer of
“spare time.” Adopting a similar symbiotic relationship, both cinema and psychoanalysis
share those same conflicts dwelling in the modern subject. By following Žižek’s spirit of
introducing psychoanalysis to a wider intellectual thinking community, this seminar
                                                                                      1

seeks to interrogate a selection of films aiming to approach basic psychoanalytic
concepts that come handy when researching in the twentieth and twentieth first-
centuries culture.
(Global Literacy)

HU 6114 Spec Top in Visual Representation: Feminism & Visual Media....Shoos

CRN 15025         2:05pm – 3:20pm TR

This course will examine the work of contemporary feminist visual media theorists,
critics, and artists/practitioners and their engagement with key intellectual and political
issues in media and media representation. Particular attention will be given to debates
that have arisen around feminism and media studies and how they are informed by the
intersections and tensions between gender, race, class, dis/ability, sexual orientation,
and age/generation. Course readings and screenings will be interdisciplinary and
drawn from areas such as film studies, cultural studies, communication, queer and
trans theory, and new media so that students gain a sense of the field of feminist
media studies and its influences and possibilities.

HU 6115 Special Topics in Technical Communication………………………Brady

CRN 15026         12:35pm – 1:50pm TR

This course traces social, political, and cultural issues that have emerged in science
and technology studies as a result of feminist examinations of gender, class, race,
ethnicity, sexual orientation, and the physical body. The course begins with an
examination of selected historiographies intended to counter descriptions of feminist
work as linear, unified, pure, and complete, and to propose, instead, that it is fluid,
plural, contradictory, and ongoing. Using the latter as a conceptual framework, the
course takes up feminist texts that probe definitions of scientific and technological
knowledge, theorize the distinctions between the two, and suggest how both
knowledge systems contribute to gender essentialism. Drawing on interdisciplinary
scholarship—women’s studies and biology, history, anthropology, sociology,
psychology—the course examines feminist research that probes the practices and
exclusions that result from such essentialism and call for alternatives to it. The course
concludes by considering ways to respond to these calls, foregrounding the multiple
facets of feminist commentary, the range of insights emerging with and among the
scholarly disciplines, and the impact of the humanities on recent feminist studies of
science and technology.

                                                                                              1

Fall 2018

HU5002 Rhetoric and Composition.............................................................Abeles

CRN

Rhetoric’s recorded history dates back to the time of Socrates, but Rhetoric and
Composition is a much more recent invention, with origins in the peculiar political, social,
and philosophical exigencies that characterize modern society and, most specifically, the
modern university classroom. This course explores how this relatively young discipline
has encountered and responded to these challenges, with a variety of pedagogical and
research methods that, amidst their diversity, continue to speak to the broader
philosophical and political challenges that face students, teachers, and the academy. At
issue will be the changing economic and institutional role of higher education, the
challenges that a variety of civil rights movements put and continue to put to the
academy, the increasing integration of technology and literacy, and debates with other
allied disciplines about what academic traditions are best positioned to teach the means
of effective communication. Throughout the course, we will keep in mind that these
contemporary issues are not so much a departure from the rhetorical tradition as they
are a continuation of rhetoric’s propensity to contest both with and against philosophy,
as well as composition’s long history of exploring how communication is vital to the
health of political agents and their agency.
(Groundwork, Methodology)

HU5008 Critical Approaches to Literature and Culture…………………..…..Van Kooy

CRN

This course will focus on the early modern production of literary, theatrical and pictorial
imagery of the New World (1603-1840). The purpose of this course will be to explore how
aesthetic discourses and practices have mediated historical and contemporary ideas about
colonial relations, nature and the environment, race, and modernity. The first four or five
weeks of the term will be devoted to achieving a basic understanding of the philosophical
traditions and contemporary theoretical approaches that define aesthetics. This reading
will include Edmund Burke’s 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the
Beautiful, but much of our attention will be directed toward Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetics
and its Discontents, The Politics of Aesthetics, and Figures of History. We will then urn to
the literary and cultural component of the course, which will include a selection of period
paintings and prints, and works by, amongst others, Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Olaudah
Equiano, Charles Brockden Brown, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a selection of plays about
the Jamaican and Haitian folk heroes, François Mackandal and Jack Mansong, Elizabeth
Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal
(1826), and The History of Mary Prince (1831).
(Groundwork, Global Literacy)

                                                                                                1

HU5012 Communication Theory……………………………………………………….Hristova
CRN
Traces the development of communication theories as they relate to oral, written, and
visual communication in pre-industrial as well as mass-media environments. The course
is designed to help students develop an understanding of theory and research for
application in their own fields, and to interpret the effects of mass communication in a
variety of contexts. Emphasizes interactions among theoretical, political, historical, and
socio-cultural factors.
(Groundwork)

HU5116 Approaches to Alterity and Difference…………………………………..Fonkoue

CRN

This graduate seminar will focus on works by a selected list of theorists/thinkers who
explored notions of otherness and difference from a variety of disciplines, including
history, feminist criticism, philosophy, cultural studies and postcolonial studies. Authors
include Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Hélène Cixous, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak,
Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway. The course will study
such common socio-cultural categories as race, gender and nationality, but also,
ultimately, bring students to reflect of the concepts of humanism and posthumanism.

HU5110 Backgrounds of Critical Theory…………………………………………..…Adolphs
CRN

This course studies the major critical theories, especially the Frankfurt School, that have
influenced contemporary theories such as feminist theory, postmodern theory, cultural
studies, critical pedagogy, and discourse theory. Special attention will also be given to
present-day theorists whose works have been informed by Critical Theory, above all
Jürgen Habermas. Given the subject matter, this course also introduces students to the
challenges of reading theoretical texts and texts in translation.
(Global Literacy, Methodology)

HU6070 Special Topics in Rhetoric and Composition: Archival
Research……………………………………………………………………………………….Romney

CRN

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

“I write this history so that it will become memory, so that it will be placed in the archive
and see justice”--Incan writer Guaman Poma

This course will give students an overview of theoretical approaches to archives and their

                                                                                           1

relationship to history. Equal attention will be given to the practice of archival research.
The course will include readings from de Certeau, Ridener, and Derrida (among others)
and will also include historians of rhetoric and composition who have addressed
questions of archival research, such as Jessica Enoch, John Brereton, and Carr, Carr and
Shultz. Readings will also include recent publications in the field providing practical
guides to archival research. In addition to shorter written responses, students will work
on an archival project relating to their own research.
(Methodology)

HU5711 Biomedical Research Ethics…………………………………………..S. Johnson
CRN

This is a discussion-centered graduate seminar that examines selected ethical theories,
principles, and problems in biomedical research ethics, with an emphasis on research
using human and animal subjects, including international research. The course provides
an introduction to the history of research ethics, and to international ethical codes that
have been adopted in reaction to abuses of research subjects. A basic grounding in
ethical principles and approaches to bioethics is included. A case-study method designed
to develop skills in the analysis of case problems in biomedical research is utilized. The
course includes case studies involving social and political science research, the use of
social media for research, and analysis of communication (e.g. informed consent
documents) in research. This course satisfies the NSF requirements for Advanced RCR
Training for students who need to fulfill this requirement. It is of particular value to
students interested in health-related research and communication.
(Advanced RCR)

Spring 2019
HU5070 History and Theory of Rhetoric………………………………..…..R. Johnson

CRN

Moves from a focus on classical rhetoric to a selective overview of rhetoric in the
medieval, Enlightenment, modern, and contemporary periods. There will be a consistent
theme of inquiry concerning the applications of rhetorical theory to the practices of
producing texts in various forms and the teaching of writing through rhetorical theories.
Further, we will read primary and secondary texts pertaining to the various periods.
(Groundwork)

                                                                                           1

HU5112 Theoretical Perspectives on Technology…………………………………….Bell
CRN

This seminar will help prepare students to investigate aspects of digital and other
technologies relevant to their individual research projects. We will spend one third of the
semester on key readings in the philosophy of technology, one third on key readings
from the Science and Technology Studies (STS) tradition, and one third on readings in
the history and culture of technology. At the conclusion of the course, students should be
able to construct a comprehensive bibliography of sources relevant to the study of a
technology of their choice, identify the theoretical perspective of each source and the
tradition of which it is a part, and begin to place their own theoretical and
methodological commitments within an ongoing scholarly conversation about the chosen
technology. Most readings will come from collections such as Readings in the Philosophy
of Technology and editions of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies; other
works may include The Machine Question (Gunkel); Aircraft Stories (Law); Scripts,
Grooves, and Writing Machines (Gitelman); and The Languages of Edison’s Light
(Bazerman).
(Groundwork)

HU5114 Visual Theory and Analysis…………………………………………….…..Kitalong

CRN

What is at stake in a shift from a primarily text-based to a more visual culture? We will
explore this question from a cross disciplinary perspective, beginning in the first half of
the semester with readings and screenings from the "classics" of visual theory, including
Barthes, Berger, Tagg, Mitchell, Kress & Van Leeuwen, and Stafford. In the second part
of the semester, the screen will take on a more central role as we examine theories of
visuality in light of technologies of image manipulation, data visualization, simulation,
and virtual or augmented reality.
(Groundwork)

HU 6070 Special Topics in Rhetoric and Composition: Rhetorical
Analysis………………………………………………………………………………....Marika Seigel

CRN
This course will introduce you to different methods of and perspectives on rhetorical
analysis in academic writing. By the end of the course, you should: (1) be able to choose
a method of analysis most appropriate to your research questions, forum, and subject
matter; (2) have a greater understanding which disciplines tend to employ rhetorical
analysis as a method and how rhetorical criticism intersects with other disciplines and
areas of inquiry; (3) be familiarized with the professional forums where rhetorical
analysis is discussed and practiced (journals, organizations, conferences, etc.), and; (4)
gain familiarity and experience with the conventions of academic writing in fields that
employ rhetorical analysis as a method.
(Methodology)
                                                                                         1

HU6111 Special Topics in Gender Studies…………………………………………Bergvall

CRN

This course challenges the notion of simplistic gendered/sexed binaries in the study of
how nature, nurture, and ideology create and are affected by language. Drawing on a
variety of textual sources (written, oral, electronic, visual) from a variety of media, we
will consider how complex sexed and gendered variations are rendered (and often
stereotyped) through a number of discursive strategies. We will review and utilize
diverse linguistic and multimodal theories and methodologies in the collection and
analysis of texts, e.g., Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, Lazar), Communities of
Practice (Lave & Wenger, Eckert & McConnell-Ginet), and Performativity (Goffman,
Austin, Butler), and examine studies of language, gender, and sexuality drawn from a
number of cultures around the world (e.g., from diverse US cultures including Native
American and African American; as well as studies done in other nations, e.g., Poland,
Japan, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, Thailand, Israel). Students will engage in
several smaller studies to practice various data collection and analysis methods, present
synopses of outside readings to the class, and will undertake one large term project and
presentation. Students are strongly encouraged to develop projects useful for conference
presentations, publications, theses or dissertations.
(Global Literacy, Methodology)

HU5100 Qualitative Humanistic Research………………………………………….…Sotirin

CRN

This seminar is about qualitative methodology focused on ethnographic sensibilities and
issues. Students are required to conduct a field project because the only way to
understand ethnographic issues is to encounter them in the process of a field study.
During the semester, students will conduct observational and interview research in a
chosen fieldsite. This requires IRB approval and ongoing ethical considerations,
fieldnotes, interpretive analysis, interviewing, transcription, reflexivity, and a final paper.
Weekly critical readings will address both practical and theoretical concerns. We will
examine arguments about the criteria and conduct of qualitative research as well as
theoretical challenges addressing such issues as authority, authenticity, representation,
embodiment, politics, performativity and materiality. Students will develop both a
sophisticated understanding of qualitative research issues and experience with the
research process.
(Methodology)

                                                                                             1

HU6115 Special Topics in Technical Communication: Communication and
Climate Change…………………………………………………………………………..…Waddell

CRN
In 2015, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called climate change “one of
the most crucial problems on earth.” Unfortunately, climate change has also been
characterized as “probably the largest science communication failure in history”
(Stoknes, 2015). A 2013 study published in Environmental Research Letters concluded
that between 1991 and 2011, 97.1% of those peer-reviewed, climate-change studies
that expressed a position on anthropogenic global warming “endorsed the consensus
position that humans are causing global warming.” Nevertheless, a 2014 Yale study
found that 35 percent of Americans still believe that global warming is caused mostly by
natural phenomena. In an attempt to identify key strategies for improving
communication about climate change, this course will consider work from a broad range
of approaches to communication, including rhetoric, risk communication, scientific and
technical communication, media and mass communication studies, and psychology.

                                                                                       1